The present invention relates to three-dimension printers and in particular to a printer using electron beams to sinter or melt layers of powder into a solid object.
Three-dimension printers for implementing additive machining may create printed objects by incrementally depositing material to a print bed or previously deposited layers in a layer-by-layer fashion. A variety of different 3-D printing technologies exist. Photo polymerization techniques use lasers to polymerize a thin surface of liquid over a print bed, the latter of which is gradually withdrawn beneath the liquid surface as the object is built up. Extrusion techniques use a similar approach but extrude material such as molten plastic from a nozzle in successive layers. Powder bed systems employ a laser or electron beam to sinter or melt particles of a powder bed into a solid structure. After each layer is formed additional powder is added on top of that layer and the process repeated.
Metal objects are most frequently constructed by 3-D printers using powder bed techniques with metallic powders or an approach similar to extrusion printing that uses a wire feedstock melted at its point of contact with a preceding layer.
The ability to construct high-resolution, large models using 3-D printing is limited by the relatively low printing speed of each of these processes. A slow printing speed has a disproportionate effect on larger high-resolution models where printing volumes scale exponentially.